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THE GET; Warsaw Weekend

By MAURA EGAN

Published: September 25, 2005

Attention, culture vultures and aesthetes: Warsaw is calling. Drop into this gritty but groovy city for the weekend and you'll discover budding art stars, avant-garde fashion and Soviet-style buildings preserved in curatorial amber. All this and a buzzing night-life scene. Welcome to the next Berlin. MAURA EGAN

Photos: 1. Architecture Old and New: Last year, the city received its first offering from the star architect Sir Norman Foster, the seven-story glass-and-concrete Metropolitan Building (right), a mixed-use structure that looks like an elegant spaceship in the middle of Marshal Pilsudski Square. After years of reviling yesterday's Eastern bloc monstrosities, design buffs are now enraptured by them. An example is the Palace of Culture and Science (Plac Defilad 1; 011 48 22 656 60 00), an ominous Big Brother structure (above center) commissioned by Stalin as ''a gift from the Soviet people.'' Today, however, the towering Soviet worker statues (above) that dot the grounds look hip rather than haunting, while the cinema is one of those grand old popcorn palaces. Check out the Hotel Sofitel Victoria (Ulica Krolewska11; 011 48 22 657 80 11), with its unabashed 1960's-Soviet-style architecture.
2. Culture: ''After Communism, we first needed supermarkets,'' says Monika Fabijanska, the director of the Polish Cultural Institute in New York. ''Now we are finally getting museums.'' The city is enjoying a cultural face-lift, with the recent opening of the Warsaw Rising Museum, and the Museum of the History of the Polish Jews and the Warsaw Museum of Contemporary Art are scheduled to be completed in the next year or two. For now, modern-art fans can visit the Center for Contemporary Art at Ujazdowski Castle (below), a space for contemporary and political art that was formed in the wake of the 1980's Solidarity movement.
3. Fashion: As in most Eastern European cities, H&M and Zara have conquered the high street. For less mainstream fashion, you need to go farther afield. Last year, the self-confessed fashion victim Robert Serek opened a Comme des Garçons guerrilla store (below), which recently moved from its original location, inside a pillar of the Poniatowski Bridge. Serek, who also edits the bilingual fashion magazine A4 and teaches statistics at the Warsaw School of Economics, opened his own shop, Orno (Ulica Wspolna 63; 011 48 606 936 606), this month. There you can load up on Martin Margiela, Raf Simons and Undercover, as well as local talent like Anna Kuczynska and Gosia Baczynska. (The new Comme shop is right behind it.) Tucked in a courtyard, Fashion By (Ulica Bracka 20) is a sliver of a shop, stocking vintage Miu Miu shoes, Helmut Lang T-shirts and an odd pile of Day-Glo Gap tees. To get the full Eastern European tourist look, pick up a toile-pattern fanny pack (the locals refer to them as kidneys). Just across the square, you can log in serious hours of Grand Theft Auto at Play (Ulica Bracka 20), a plywood-and-drywall operation that also sells Tyvek paper clothes, Nike jackets and reworked vintage apparel.
4. Art: As the Leipzig and Berlin art scenes have been picked over, international curators and collectors have migrated here to mine for lesser-known talent at cut-rate prices. The first stop on the shopping spree should be the Raster gallery and salon (Utica Hoz a 42/8; 011 48 606 658 399), where the directors, Michal Kaczynski and Lukasz Gorczyca (above), look more like Green Day members than art machers in the making. Despite the gallery's grass-roots feel, the program is undeniably blue-chip: the painter Wilhelm Sasnal is already commanding five-figure prices, while the photographers Aneta Grzeszykowska and Jan Smaga are fast becoming regulars on the biennale circuit. Check out the paintings of Zbigniew Rojalski, which are being gobbled up by collectors like the Rubells. The Foksal Gallery Foundation (top) (Ulica Gorskiego 1a; 011 48 22 826 50 81), hidden behind the fashionable shopping strip Nowy Swiat, works with provocative art stars like Maurizio Cattelan, Piotr Uklanski and Artur Zmijewski. Le Guern Gallery (Ulica Widok 8; 011 48 22 690 69 69) highlights include young talent from Gdansk.
5. A Boutique Hotel: The Hotel Rialto (Ulica Wilcza 73; 011 48 22 584 8700) is the

city's first boutique operation (below), with all the trimmings: flat-screen televisions, DVD library, etc. The look is Art Deco, right down to the parquet floors, Tamara Lempicka prints and mother-of-pearl elevator. Some rooms contain immaculate reproductions of seccessionist furniture for a Viennese fin-de-siècle ambience, while others have a more African look, with zebra rugs and tribal masks.
6. Food and Beverage: Most locals subsist on pirogis, so the noshing options for gourmands are next to nil. Miedzy Nami (above) (Ulica Bracka 20; 011 48 22 827 94 41) offers quesadillas and lattes to demicelebs like MTV V.J.'s and weekending Brits who have flown over on Easyjet. The Poles take their drinking seriously, so for a masterfully concocted cocktail, head to Cinnamon (plac Pilsudskiego 1; 011 48 22 323 76 00) in the Metropolitan Building. The look (white leather banquettes) and the late-night antics (Hilton-style table dancing) are slightly South Beach, but it's ideal for an early-evening gin and tonic. (Photographs By Gregor Hohenberg For The New York Times)

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